Questions about the site and nature of money's value dominated eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American economic thought. Though colonial Americans flirted with liberal monetary ideas and institutions through the first half of the eighteenth century, Imperial decree based on mercantilist principles banished fundamental change. The Revolution, however, liberated and recharged American financial and intellectual speculation. Into the nineteenth century, Americans followed the Scottish political economists and increasingly adopted liberal ideas on money, banking and the nature of the economy.

Americans' adoption of liberal economic ideas and practices touched on more than just the economy. This shift refocused ideas about the summum bonum – the good life – in everyday experience and undermined mercantilist notions of the organic social order. Recent scholarship argues that trade policies during the Early Republic constituted a neo-mercantile strategy. This literature, however, ignores the demands of mercantilism outside of trade relationships. Mercantilism's zero-sum economy denigrated individual consumption, equated specie with wealth, promoted its accumulation, and privileged the state-centred whole over its individual members. In other words, it distrusted and sacrificed individual freedom and desire for the benefit of the organic whole.